


can you see me? (i’m waiting for the right time)

by toddxnderson



Category: The Wilds (TV 2020)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, First Kiss, Love Confessions, Missing Scene, leah reads richard siken and you can pry this from my cold dead hands, proud to be an agent of the leahfatin agenda
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:26:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28139901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toddxnderson/pseuds/toddxnderson
Summary: leah can’t sleep. fatin’s the only one who can help.or, two girls fall in love under the summer moon.
Relationships: Leah Rilke/Fatin Jadmani
Comments: 26
Kudos: 230





	can you see me? (i’m waiting for the right time)

**Author's Note:**

> title taken from bags by clairo.
> 
> v excited to spread the leahfatin agenda by being the second ever fic under their tag... sapphic rights

The island never felt fully dark, somehow. It was odd, having the moon there- she shone down like a friendly silver ghost, pouring clean light onto the sand from dusk until the first dredges of dawn. It wasn’t like Leah had never seen the moon before, of course, she’d written entire poems about it for fuck’s sake, but she’d only ever seen it when she was actively looking. She didn’t need to anymore. 

It had been an asset at first, the little sparks of light scattered through the otherwise pitch black, but around day seven the novelty had almost entirely worn off. It was hard to sleep with it there, smothering everything. It was ethereal. Eerie. Not quite right. 

The only person who didn’t seem to have a problem with it was Fatin; Fatin, who slept through everything, who hadn’t even woken to Dot’s hail of curses when she had abruptly awoken to literal bat shit inside her mouth that night in the cave, who had woken the next morning bleary eyed and confused, pestering everyone in the vicinity until someone finally told her what had happened. Fatin, with her stupid perfect face.

Leah rolled over on the sand to look at her. She was sleeping, of course, eyes twitching almost undetectably as if prompted by the breeze, and yet her face was as expressive as though she was awake; mouth pulled tight in something between happiness and anger, nose scrunched up against the cold, forehead creased in dreaming thought. 

_To die, to sleep- to sleep, perchance to dream._

Of course it was Hamlet that would come to her head, she thought with a twinge of annoyance- she’d never quite been able to shake the pretentious Shakespeare phase her English teacher had instilled in her as a freshman. Still. It was fitting. Looking at Fatin like this was a little like looking at Jeanette in those stomach-dropping moments on the beach that first day, the unsettling warmth of death lingering on her skin, face still moulded in the shape of her life, her emotions. It scared her. 

The words slipped from her mouth without warning. 

“Fatin. Fatin.”

A battered trainer jerked slightly, forming a crater in the sand. The rest of the leg. 

“Fatin.” Leah could feel the panic spilling over into her voice, but she didn’t care, couldn’t force herself to calm down. She needed _someone._ She needed Fatin, her last link to the real world, the one constant that tethered her to the person she was supposed to be. 

The girl groaned, digging an elbow deep into the sand as her eyes flicked open. “What?”

And all of a sudden it was too much; the crash, the island, Jeanette, the shallow grave; the strangers, the cold, the darkness; the mirror, the phone, _fucking Jeff,_ Jeff and Ian and Fatin Fatin Fatin with her big brown eyes screwed up in concern. 

She started to cry. 

“Shit, Leah, what’s wrong?” The girl pulled herself up and over onto her knees before crawling over with stubborn speed, a hand outstretched in a futile gesture of comfort. 

“I don’t-” Leah wiped a sleeve across her face- “I don’t know.”

Fatin had found her way to her side, clasped around her arm, fingers digging into her woollen cardigan. “Did something happen?”

She shook her head. 

“Then- shit, is this about the other day?”

“No, no, it’s not that.” 

An edge of desperation cut into Fatin’s questions. “What’s wrong? You can tell me, Leah.”

The words seemed silly to say out loud. They cloyed in her throat. “I- I can’t stop seeing her.”

“Who?” Fatin asked, but her expression darkened as the meaning settled in. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Leah sniffed, pressing her free arm tight against her body. “You know, I thought you- when you were sleeping, I kept thinking you looked like her. Just the way you were lying there.”

“Oh.” 

The silence of the beach rang out through the air between them. Words didn’t seem to fit. 

After a moment of uncomfortable quiet, Fatin cleared her throat. “I don’t think we really look that similar, you know. Like, I don’t actually have intense bangs, and P!NK’s not exactly my style. Thought you’d know that by now, at least.” The easy tone of her voice didn’t quite mask the discomfort and worry behind it, and something caught in Leah’s chest.

“You don’t have to try to make it funny, you know.” The crackle of the fire. Martha snoring from three feet away. “It isn’t always like that, the sort of thing you can just make all light and pretty. It’s just shit. It’s probably-” she inhaled a shaky breath- “it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I watched a girl die, Fatin. I don’t know how to- how to forget, how to make it go away. I can’t.”

“Yeah.” Fatin was staring at the ground, hands slipping from their hold on Leah’s arm. “This is bad, isn’t it?” It wasn’t entirely a question.

“I think so,” she replied quietly. 

Their eyes flicked in tandem to the sea and hovered there, watching the inky churn of it. The night felt like it was set in glass; tat a single misstep would send it all shattering around them. 

“We’ll be ok,” Fatin said finally. “We’ll be ok. We’ll get out of here.”

Leah’s tongue felt unfamiliar in her mouth, and the words dried up as she tried to speak. “But what if we don’t?” Her head turned involuntarily towards the other girl, who still watched the shore with a more serious face than she’d ever worn before, something stone and immovable about her delicate nature, something worn and eroded in her tired gaze. Her hands had now fallen to the ground, fiddling with grains of sand with such gentleness that in the light it seemed almost like she was dissolving into the very land that held her up. She was beautiful, Leah thought. She had no idea how she’d got this far without noticing. 

It was like that poetry book she’d loved once upon a time, her favourite for years until Jeff had proclaimed it overrated and trite, a judgement that had forever soured it for her in some immutable, weathered way. But there was a quote that still stung for her, the words still objectively beautiful and somehow eternal. 

_You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you’ve done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shovelled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you’re tired._

Leah was so tired. And this may not have been a car but they were certainly racing towards a brick wall at lethal speed, and Fatin may not be a boy and this may not have been anything like she had imagined but _fuck_ it felt right, drilled into her bones and echoing through the caverns of her heart, _love love love_ all the way down, all the way to the central point that everything expanded from. The central point, buried somewhere in the tree rings of Fatin’s eyes. 

“We will. We will get out. I swear to you, we will.” Fatin said, placing a hand over Leah’s knee. The tender, honey-sweet warmth of her fingers sank right into her bloodstream. “I don’t make a lot of promises ‘cause I’m bad at keeping them but fuck, Leah, I can promise you that.”

It was Leah that broke eye contact, forcing her face back towards the ground. “I’m sorry for waking you.”

“No, no, don’t be.”

“It was silly.” Red hot embarrassment started to creep along her jaw, flushing into the apples of her cheeks. “I’d appreciate if you’d, uh, if you wouldn’t tell the others about this.”

“‘Course. No problem.” 

Fatin turned away, eyes blinking closed for a moment longer than usual, and Leah realised with a start that it was over. They were done talking. 

“Sorry, I’ll- we should probably get some sleep,” she said, pulling away. She hoped she wasn’t imagining the glint of surprised disappointment in the other girl’s face. 

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Still can’t really believe you managed to wake me up, I’m a pretty heavy sleeper.”

Leah snorted. “Yeah, I know.”

_You’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and you’re trying not to tell him that you love him, and you’re trying to choke down the feeling, and you’re trembling,_

She flopped back down on the sand and let it slide into the shape of a nest around her shoulders. Fatin didn’t move for a moment, didn’t seem to breathe, and the half-half second blossomed into a year, a decade, an eternity of a singular flicker of time, all the world contained; in a single beach, in the longing that leapt hungrily from Leah’s chest like a foreign monster, in the almost imperceptible pinpoint of light in Fatin’s unreadable eyes, and God it was just a little too much and the moon hit her jaw just right and and and-

Fatin glanced up, grinning. 

That was enough. Leah pushed herself forward and kissed her.

_but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you’ve discovered something you didn’t even have a name for._

**Author's Note:**

> quote from you are jeff by richard siken. 
> 
> thank u for reading!! if u want to see me yell about leahfatin until the end of time u can find me on twitter @toddxnderson <3


End file.
